All donations DOUBLED

Articles by Tom Philpott

Tom Philpott was previously Grist's food writer. He now writes for Mother Jones.

All Articles

  • Cargill, the National School Lunch Program, and antibiotic-resistant salmonella

     In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. ———- Is antibiotic-resistant-salmonella-tainted beef what’s for dinner? Standard j-school-style journalism takes a lot of lumps these days–and justifiably so. To maintain an illusion of “objectivity,” traditional reporters write like above-the-fray observers merely recording “the facts”–as if choosing which facts to […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • The obvious advantage of organic food over conventional

    A bit of nitrogen with those veggies? A recent literature review [PDF] by the U.K. Food Standards Agency concluded that organic foods offer no nutritional advantages to ones grown with conventional chemical agriculture. The report quickly bounced around the media and the internets and has congealed into received wisdom. For example, in a recent chat […]

    Tom Philpott Culture

  • More thoughts on cooking, Pollan, and Julia Child

    Tool of oppression–or liberation? In his recent essay on cooking, which I commented on here, Michael Pollan basically argues that people need to cook–that they give up more than they gain from fleeing the kitchen. And he suggests that the current generation is really the first to shun cooking. Yet things might not be quite […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • The thread on which civilization hangs

    “Number one is that it [industrial agriculture] destroys soil. Absolutely and completely. The soil is the only thread upon which civilization can exist, and it’s such a narrow strip around the globe if a person could ever realize that our existence depends on literally inches of active aerobic microbial life on terra firma, we might […]

    Tom Philpott Food